Geocentric web interfaces are useful in visualizing spatially and geographically related data. For example, a number of Internet-based mapping services allow users to view street maps or satellite photographs of a location by the user providing an address for the location of interest. Similarly, weather services allow users to specify a city or region of interest, and will present a weather map or a satellite weather image of the specified city or region. Thus, by directing content from a website maintained by one of these content-specific services to a browser allows users to review maps or other views that present the desired content.
Researchers make use of many different types of networked remote sensors to gather information about myriad different types of location data. In addition to weather data, sensors are used to monitor seismic activity, ambient solar or other radiation, traffic densities, concentrations of pollutants or other chemicals, and many other types of information. In seeking to present the data gathered by these devices, researchers devise their own, ad hoc solution to attempt to overlay the data from their own, known sensors over a visual representation of the location of interest. Typically, these solutions require a researcher or another operator to manually edit the representation or create a separate overlay for the representation to show the data reported by the sensor or associate a link to the sensor source for every sensor the researcher wishes to represent in the location.